


tabula rasa

by plethola



Category: Dangan Ronpa, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 18:46:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plethola/pseuds/plethola
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside of me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” Contains spoilers for both games, and for DR Zero, if that matters to anyone here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tabula rasa

**Author's Note:**

> The quote in the summary is from Franz Kafka. This is based on what happened in the games, but also has Sci-Fi elements, like Twogami's ability. Pulled from a prompt on Tumblr. This was kinda hard for me to write, and I apologize for any errors or flights of whimsy. Aaah. I forget what else there is to say, so I'll end it with this statement.

The machine started and the liquid ignited his nostrils.  
  
“Down, hold him down.”  
  
Plastic hands rested on his chest. There was so much, he had to tell them. So much, but it was not enough. His limbs flexed under the hyper-enforced restraints. He could feel it pump into his muscles. A cloud of prismatic color flowered in his vision. So much.  
  
“Check his temperature. Come on.”  
  
Ripping, ripping. Not quite. The needles in his body flexed as he bucked violently forward, arched his back, screamed a wooden silence into the mask. A thousand heartbeats at once. Release.  
  
“He’s fading. Dammit.” Togami pounded his fist on the instrument table. “Don’t let go. Keep him steady, Naegi.”  
  
Release.

  
  
He had been employed. Yes, he had been drafted. He sat at the foot of the matron.  
  
“You will have no name,” she said to him. “Your only purpose, to serve the bloodline, to serve your employer. Consent.”  
  
He gave the sign in front of the matron, that shedding of youth that obliterated all that was left of his memories, his accumulated identity, and his given name. The ashes were swept away.  
  
“You will answer me. Why does the family serve?”  
  
He looked up, his eyebrows knitted, meditative. “To prosper and to live.”  
  
The matron had no face, so she gave the sign that she was pleased, that he may see it and be honored.  
  
“We have sacrificed much of our fortune to amplify you. We have given much away that we may train you. This is our bloodline. Our ritual. Remember it, even when you have forgotten everything.”  
  
He consented.  
  
“You are released.”

  
  
  
A second dose of the liquid fire. The sweat returned to his brow. Ripping.  
  
“What’s happening?”  
  
Repairing. His eyes rolled back into his head. Fists clenched and unclenched until fingers were pushed too far apart.  
  
“He’s trying to change. Keep an eye on that monitor.”

  
  
  
Her name was Junko Enoshima, a goddess, and he served her.  
  
“Why do you eat so much?” she said through a smile, her voice low and betraying no warm emotion.  
  
“To remind me to forget.”  
  
“That sounds circular and totally bogus.” Her eyelids fluttered.  
  
“It’s a living meditation. It helps in giving me control over my powers.”  
  
“Okay.” She consulted a monitor and swiped her fingers vertically. “I see. No-name, do you know Mikan?”  
  
Inwardly, he couldn’t help but shudder, though on the surface his body was trained to reveal nothing. “Yes. We have spoken.”  
  
“Please meet her out at the hangar. She’ll debrief you on the assignment.” She yawned and flipped a page on the holo reader.  
  
“I don’t have a name.”  
  
She looked up. “Sorry?”  
  
“I don’t have a name. I am someone else. I am always someone else. I would rather not be called No-name, or any other variation. That is our honor. Our ritual.”  
  
She laughed at him for the first time. The motion of her lips was surreal to him. “He has his kinks,” she said simply, and pulled up a picture to display on the holo.  
  
His eyes rested on the face of a stranger.  
  
“Who is that man?” he asked.  
  
“A dead neurologist. He had been so dear to my heart. His name was Matsuda. Your name is Matsuda now. Is that all right, dear?”  
  
He became the projection, coiling his muscles, pushing the shapes within his stretchform clothing. He was Matsuda. Yes. Matsuda the neurologist.  
  
Enoshima clapped her hands. “Perfect.” Everything about her was glowing. She reminded Matsuda of the matron. But terrible, Matsuda decided. Much more terrible.

  
  
  
“Not enough,” he managed. The mask had been pulled off after his previous fit. “Tell. Not enough.”  
  
“What was that?”  
  
“Release. Not enough to feed. Release.”  
  
“Kirigiri, can you hear me back there? Dial down the shifting fluid. I think he wants us to pump it in installments, with rests in between.”  
  
“They lied,” Matsuda coughed, baffled by the light. “They all lied.”  
  
“What do you mean? Who lied? Matsuda. Matsuda!”

  
  
His face was lined with sweat. “What do you mean?”  
  
“They lied to you.”  
  
Junko plucked a strawberry wandering away from her plate and ate it upside down. It was unnerving to watch her eat. Like watching a vulture pick apart a carcass. They were all there, the members of her inner circle, in the anti-gravity chamber. Matsuda had just done a terrible thing. They had all done terrible things. Some looked scared, or about to break any minute. Others, like the girl in pink, looked almost euphoric.  
  
“You are not the heir to anything. Your bloodline is just a poor delusion.”  
  
“Be careful,” said Matsuda, breaking his identity for a second. “I can kill you for speaking ill of my family. It’s under the contract.”  
  
Her face was set in exaggerated sadness. He heard someone giggle. “There is no contract. You are alone.”  
  
“You liar.” He said, letting the form and feel of Matsuda go. “What have you done to my clan?”  
  
“Let’s answer that question with a story. Once upon a time, in a magical kingdom before my reign of despair, there lived a family of con-artists. Their talent was shapeshifting and acting using a highly toxic liquid called shifting fluid to achieve it. They were famous for their elusiveness, imagination and untouchability. I came along and promised them the world. The bank statements of the Togami Conglomerate. The Kuzuryuu Clan as their waiting staff. A cure to the debilitating effects of shifting fluid. You name it. They were disposed of instead. Oops.”  
  
“You liar. I’ll kill you.” A set of strong hands held him back, twisting his arms behind him, making him spin in midair.  
  
“Can’t you feel it? There it is, just a glimmer. A hint of a rose garden just ahead of you,” she was on the edge of her seat. It was the first true emotion Junko has ever displayed. It disgusted and terrified him. “I needed you. The runt who just started high school. Take our son, they said. We don’t care. Give us what we want. I showed them pictures. Promises. A new world order on this fragile graveyard of silicon. They didn’t care, no, no, no. Power was what they wanted. Influence. So I gave them just that. Tsumiki-chan, the anesthetic.”  
  
“Y-yes, mistress.” The girl in the pink floated forward with a syringe balanced gingerly in her hands.  
  
“They lied to you first. Yasuke Matsuda’s method helped in wiping your memory, feeding the delusion. The cult, the ritual, it was all their idea. All to make you devoted to me. They wanted that power so much. So after we finally tricked you, I gave it to them. Presidents, kings and queens, gang leaders, all of them. Your large family has taken their respective roles as rulers of the world, all under my power, their memories erased for convenience, utterly convinced they are who they’re acting as, the end. Gone fowevuh.” She winked at him and giggled.  
  
“No, no, you’re lying.”  
  
A mess of shadows and bandages.  
  
“You saw what we did.” Junko’s face evoked cold, empty apathy. “We made the whole world despair. There’s nothing left for you. Fall.”  
  
“Liar.” His eyes stung, and he couldn’t feel the pain in his arms. “Liar.”  
  
“Liar,” she repeated, as the girl named Tsumiki-chan stuck a needle in him, collapsing his writhing body in an instant.

  
  
  
“That’s insane.” Naegi watched the heaving form of the man who thought he was Matsuda.  
  
“It’s Junko Enoshima we’re talking about.” Togami was watching the shift fluid levels. “They injected him with anesthetic to give his mind a rest. A period to sort out the despair. Too much information would have torn the man to pieces, could have aggravated that toxic, shift fluid heart of his. Anyway, it worked. He continued to serve under her until we found him. Enoshima certainly employed an imaginative array of means to accumulate her army of despair. All to prove her twisted point.”  
  
“I have read the files,” said Kirigiri, coming to Naegi’s side. “Stockholm Syndrome, appeals to the psyche, appeals to the heart. But with this man who claims to be Matsuda, she managed to convince a family of con artists to deceive their own son into being almost religiously devoted to her, and she then proceeded to break him from the inside out. She must have really valued his talent to go to such lengths.”  
  
“But why didn’t she use Matsuda instead of her own sister during our confinement?” asked Naegi.  
  
“When we found him, he was close to death,” said Kirigiri. “It was Togami who listened to him. I believe you said he was speaking about her face, how she didn’t have one. It is Junko’s own undoing. By committing assault on Matsuda’s fragile mental health, she planted fear in his heart, the fear of Junko herself. Being forced to turn into her must have driven him mad, inciting him to rebel against her.”  
  
“He was brainwashed,” said Naegi, looking at his hands. “He doesn’t even know who he is anymore.”  
  
“He’s coming to.” Togami glanced at the others and turned to the man on the operating table, leaning forward. “Matsuda. Can you hear me?”  
  
“Matsuda?” His voice was thin, weak. “No. Not Matsuda. Junko.”  
  
“My name is Byakuya Togami. I am a former family member of the Togami Conglomerate. Can you hear me?”  
  
“Togami. Yes.”  
  
“I listened to you when we found you outside of Hope’s Peak. Now listen to me. I know how it feels, to lose your family, your self. To have your worldview, everything you know, broken to pieces. But believe me, you can pull through. I have seen, firsthand, the darkness of the world refracted within me. And now I look to the future.”  
  
Matsuda’s eyes were half open, flickering. His mouth was slack, mouthing the beginnings of words. “Future.”  
  
“Listen closely. The worst can only get better. That’s a new proverb of the Togami Conglomerate I want to recreate, a Togami Conglomerate that can help rebuild the world.”  
  
“The world.”  
  
“You can help me. Do you understand? You can be Togami, if you want to. It is your choice.”  
  
“Choice. Want to help. Want to stop her. Stop despair.”  Matsuda reached out a hand to Togami, and felt his muscles ripple and repair before he fainted.  
  
“He’s exhausted. We’ve done all we can.”  
  
“He tried to copy you, Byakuya,” said Naegi, “but it looks like he got some things wrong.”  
  
“I suspect it’s what he looked like before all that fluid was pumped into him,” said Kirigiri. “A mixture of that and Togami himself.”  
  
“Call Future Foundation,” said Togami. “They’ll want him prepped with the rest for the Rehabilitation Program.”


End file.
